Uneasy is the girl who wears the name Crowne.
This fight has never been with Ned. If it were just about that, it would’ve been over already.
We were all chess pieces fighting to be queen.
Ned was a pawn.
It’s a good thing I’ve been warring with the best queen since the day she gave birth to me.
“I’m not you. I’m not going to let the love of my life go because I was too afraid.”
She looked up, eyes slowly finding mine. “You don’t get to stay a princess and marry a pauper, Abigail.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be a princess,” I said.
“You will always be a Crowne, Abigail,” my mother said. “Unfortunately.”
To be a Crowne was more than a name, it’s blood, it’s the insidious connections laid root centuries before you were ever born. I could change my last name to Squarepants and still be a Crowne.
“You underestimate me. You always underestimate me. The next time we meet, I will be just Abigail.”
Her brows furrowed, but I walked out, not giving her a chance to respond.
I was Abigail Crowne, fire starter, attention seeker, scandal maker. The Reject Princess. Unloved, uncared for, unwanted. There was only one way to dethrone a princess. As my mom said, you don’t get to stay a princess and marry a pauper, and a Crowne without a castle is just a hunk of metal.
33
THEO
The house was inland of Crowne Point, up on a hill so you could still see a brief glimmer of the ocean, like a sapphire line coating the horizon. It was a sprawling mansion, one of the newer ones built in the last few years. When I was a teenager first living with Abigail, this land used to be grass.
We used to come up here and smoke weed, watching the sunset.
I was certain I had the wrong name and number, but I’d double and triple checked. This was the home of Miranda Lemaire, my mother.
I knocked on the door and waited. It wasn’t long before the door opened. I don’t know who I’d expected to open it, but I’d hoped it wouldn’t be my mother. A useless hope borne from the pounding in my blood, a reminder I wasn’t ready.
Maybe I never would be.
Just a moment later, the door opened. She was pretty, with pale green eyes and long, brown hair. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. I wrote it off as nerves.
Her lips parted when she saw me.
A stretched, stiff silence passed.
Say hi, idiot.
“You might not know me,” I started.
She stared at me like I was a ghost. “Theo?”
“Uh, yeah—”
She dragged me into a hug, cutting me off. I could count on one hand the number of people who’d hugged me in my life—one, Abigail. I didn’t know how to respond, so I just stayed put, stiffly accepting this woman hugging me.
My mother.
After a minute she pulled back, shaking her head. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. I never thought I would see you again. Will you come in?”
Another moment of silence.
Come in? I didn’t have a game plan for this. You prepared for nightmares. You prepared for the worst possible outcome. What do you do when your dreams come true?
“Uh, yeah.”
She brought me into a sitting room bathed in warm light, and I awkwardly took a seat, perched on the edge. I felt massive on her furniture.
She was nervous. Her hands in her lap, then beside her thighs, then back in her lap. She proposed tea, and I wondered if it was so she could have something to do with her hands. I said yes, just so I could say something. She stood, walking out of the room into what looked like a kitchen.
On the mantel were plenty of pictures—no kids, it appeared—and I hated myself for being grateful. Most were of my mom and another pretty woman with silky dark-chocolate skin and braids that looked like a crown, one on their wedding day, it appeared. I knew the woman. Everyone knew the woman. She was Penelope “Penny” Lemaire, the mayor of Crowne Point.
I realized then I knew where I’d seen my mother before, at a party. The mayor wasn’t always in attendance—for example, a local politician would never receive a July Fourth invite, but no doubt she’d been at a few. My gut bottomed out, realizing I’d once been feet away from my own mother.
I should’ve pieced it together earlier. Lemaire wasn’t exactly a common surname, but I just never imagined my own mother would be part of the rich and powerful.
And I would be a dirty secret.
Again.
I worked my thumb, waiting for her to politely kick me out, bribe me to keep my mouth shut.
She came out with a glazed wooden tray holding steaming porcelain cups.
“There’s so much I want to say to you,” she said. “I can’t shake the feeling we’ve met before. Probably just the guilt.” She gave me a weak smile.
“I used to live with the Crownes,” I said.
Her eyebrows raised, and I saw she was making the same realization as I was.
“I see it now. You and the youngest…” The tray she was holding shook. She set the tea down next to a stack of magazines, and I saw what was beside them: a bound, red-leather book with a burned tree design. The last time I’d seen it I was handing it to Gemma, for whatever reason I didn’t want to think about.
Now my mom’s diary—her diary—was beating between us.
She must have noticed me eyeing it, because she said, “You probably don’t remember, but I gave this to you.”
“I’ve kept it with me for twenty-three years.” Silence engulfed us. When I dreamed of meeting my mom, it was beautiful and rosy, with no place for anger and rejection.
In reality, all I could feel were my scars breaking open.
“Why the fuck do you have it?” I couldn’t look her in the eyes.
“I…I was looking for you. I only recently learned you never went to a family, Theo,” she explained. “I’ve been looking and looking for you, but everyone who was there when I left you at the station was either dead or a dead end. I got desperate. This was my last hope.”
She caressed the leather front. “I got the diary… I didn’t get you. They wouldn’t even tell me how they got it, or where they got it.”
I ground my jaw, fighting the urge to stand up and leave, but at least I found my mother’s eyes. Pale like mine.
“But you found me anyway. You followed my map.”
Abigail would say it was fate. In her romantic, starry-eyed view of life, she would look at all these coincidences and say it was fate. I got rid of my mom’s diary. I’d chucked it, assuming I’d cut it and that part out of my life.
It led me back to her.
“Why did you leave me?” My pain came rushing out in a jagged yell. “You abandoned me. You just let me go. Now you’re saying you wanted to be found?”
Her brows caved. “I thought I was giving you a better life.”
I looked around at her mansion, her beautiful things and apparently perfect marriage to one of the most powerful people in Crowne Point.
I scoffed.
“More like you were burying a dirty fucking secret.”
“I didn’t used to live like this. I was fifteen and poor, with strict conservative parents who promised you would go to a better family if I just let you go. I believed them. Anyone was better than me. I can’t erase what I did. I can’t take back those years—”
“Would you do it again?”
Say no. Say you regret everything you did to me.
“Yes.”
I stood up.
“Have you ever done something awful for the right reasons?” she asked my back.
“No,” I lied.
“Well… good. If you had grown up in the house I did, with the parents I had, you would’ve.”
I spun around. “You should’ve stayed. You should’ve kept me.”
“I wouldn’t have loved you, not how you should’ve been loved. I wasn’t able to love you. Just being there isn’t enough.”
>
I ground my teeth, wanting to argue, not knowing how. I’d watched Abigail with a mother who stayed and who destroyed her with it. Which one of us had it better? It was an impossible question to answer.
I wanted my mother to regret everything.
To say she was sorry, that if she could’ve gone back in time and made things perfect for us.
“Where are you living now?” She sounded choked.
“The motel.”
She frowned at that. “Are you happy there? Do you…” She trailed off, more lines growing between her brows. “We have a lot of empty rooms in this house. I mean—this is presumptuous. You don’t even know me. You probably hate me. I should be better at this…”
She couldn’t be about to ask me what I think she was.
She didn’t know me. I didn’t know her. This was the first time we’d met since she gave me up.
I still resented her, anger still burned my throat.
She exhaled. “If you’re going to leave, at least take the diary back. It belongs to you.” She bent down, lifting it off the coffee table, and then I saw the newspaper. On the front page, an announcement for a wedding: Abigail Crowne and Edward Harlington. My mom’s voice blurred into the background.
Ned had his arm around a stiff-looking Abigail. That was just two days ago, on the fucking pier. How had I not seen him?
“Theo, I know we can’t start over, but can we try and start again?”
I headed to the door without thought.
“Theo?”
I looked back, realizing Miranda had been talking.
A wrinkle formed on her tan forehead. “Is something wrong?”
I was more torn than I’d ever been. I wanted to sit back down and talk to my mom. What if this was my only chance to ask her the questions burning cigarette holes in my soul?
This was all I’d ever wanted in life. I was moments away from no longer being the lonely boy sitting in the sand.
“I…” I raked a hand through my hair. “I have to go.”
Sadness washed her features, but she nodded. She followed me out the door and gave me her phone number at the doorstep. “Call me, please, Theo. If you need anything, anything at all.”
I took it, a foreign feeling in my gut. Hope? Then I turned my sights toward the sea, where Crowne Hall’s jutting and pointed black pepperbox turrets were visible against the sparkling sea.
They wouldn’t let me inside Crowne Hall willingly, but fuck willing. I used my servant code to get inside the gate, and my fists to get inside the main hall once I was spotted. I left a trail of catharsis, of groaning bodies and blood in my wake.
I might’ve forgotten why I’d come in the fury, if not for one single burning thought: Abigail.
I could take two on one, even three on one, but once four fully trained guards surrounded me, fists landing on my jaw, my gut, flying all at once, it was touch-and-go. I wouldn’t give up.
I wouldn’t.
“Stop.”
All at once they let me go. Tansy stood in the middle of the hallway.
“You have made quite a mess,” she murmured, looking at the blood staining her priceless black-and-gold rugs, the groaning bodyguards. I spat blood.
“You…broke…our…deal,” I said my words through heavy breaths, my shoulders dragging up and down.
She tsked, shaking her head. “I’ve upheld my end. Edward was off the property. Abigail had guards. We broke the engagement for the summer… we never discussed the fall.”
Evil. Tansy Crowne was straight-up evil.
“You, however, you’ve been everywhere, haven’t you? Checking with the staff to see how she’s eating and sleeping. Sending her food. Buying her presents. Bribing my son as if I wouldn’t realize who was pulling the strings. You were supposed to leave, and you never left.”
“We never discussed how I would leave,” I said, throwing it back at her.
I swear her face twitched with a smile.
“Where is she?”
She looked at her clock. “Fulfilling empty threats.”
I ground my knuckles into my palm, resisting the urge to tear the entire goddamn mansion apart. I was done playing by their rules. It was a mistake to ever think I could. I should’ve played to my strengths. People like them stayed up in their ivory towers so blood never stained the soles of their designer shoes. It was time to get brutal, vicious, and dirty.
“As long as she’s a Crowne, you can’t be together, Theo,” she sighed. “Trying will just bring destruction. For you.”
“Maybe.” I wiped sweat off my lip with the back of my hand, staining my lip red with blood, eyes locked with Tansy’s. “But I hope you know you’ve just signed his death warrant.”
34
ABIGAIL
I found my mother in the room that started it all. It was hard to believe only a few months ago I’d stumbled in here, still drunk from the night before, about to have my life upended again. I was bleeding from wounds I wouldn’t acknowledge. Now I was healing, I sorta-kinda got along with my sister, and I’d loved.
I’d really, truly loved.
Blood was on the carpet—fresh blood—and I stopped in my tracks, forgetting the reason I’d come. Servants scrubbed it out of the pearly fibers, soap mixing with the blood into strawberry foam.
“What happened?” I asked.
“A dog got loose in the house,” my mom muttered. “You just missed him.”
Theo?
My heart hammered. Why had Theo come, and why had he left a trail of blood?
I shook my head.
I had to stick to my plan.
“I’ve eloped,” I said.
I saw the shock my mom tried to hide. Her jaw clenched, and she nearly knocked over a bucket of soapy water. The maid was there, ready to clean it up.
“I’ve got it,” my mother hissed.
Her eyes landed on mine.
“That joke needs some work, Abigail.”
I threw down magazine after magazine after magazine, just like my mother had done months before. On every cover was a picture of me and a blacked-out picture of a man. Variations of the same title slashed across the glossy fronts, ABIGAIL CROWNE ELOPES WITH MYSTERY BODYGUARD. A small rectangular picture of Ned was in the corner. The worst photo I could find. They’d spent the time trying to guess whom I’d married over Edward Harlington.
Neither my mother nor Ned were those you can win by force. I couldn’t call the police. I couldn’t call my lawyers. In this world, you won with psychological warfare. You couldn’t get caught up in right and wrong. As my grandma once told me, You can be in the right and lose.
This time I came to the paparazzi with a scandal. The people who’d burned down my life over and over again, I’d handed the matches.
I held out my left hand, where a simple rose gold ring wrapped around my finger and small, rough-cut pieces of translucent seashells refracted light. I thought it some kind of poetry to use my own jewelry.
I was saving myself, after all.
It didn’t matter there was no record of any marriage. I gave the press a good story and enough information for it to seem legit. Oh, what a scandal. I eloped right after the press announcement of my engagement. Everyone ate it up. I’d been on such good behavior, after all, but now I was back to starting fires.
“They came out this morning,” I said. “I fell in love with my bodyguard. All those late nights and close quarters. Guess they figured it out.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie. I had fallen in love. For the first time, I recognized the power in truth. It not only destroyed my mother but cut me in the process.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she all but hissed.
“I imagine the acquisition will fall through. Marrying Ned will as well. You’ll take away my trust fund, my equity, and leave me with nothing, then kick me out. Oh, and you’ll have to disown me. Publicly.”
Her eyes slimmed. “You want a punishment?”
“A reward.”
I swear I saw a look of admiration in her face, but it faded quickly.
“I was never a princess. I was always a reject.”
A moment passed, Mom studying me like I was some new creature, not her daughter.
“Was it worth it?” she asked.
I would lose my family, my mother, my grandfather, and my siblings. I’d be left with no money—nothing. Was it?
Yes.
I kept waiting for the time I wouldn’t be afraid, as if that was the moment my love for Theo would become real, but love isn’t real without fear. Love is fear. Fearing it can be taken away, but trusting him not to. Jumping into a black abyss without a bungee cord.
“You might want to find that dog of yours before he runs loose,” she said obliquely. “Take what you want out of your room. I don’t know how you’re going to carry it, or where you’re going. I don’t care. You’re gone by tonight.”
Oddly enough, she wasn’t angry, and her eyes had softened.
I nodded, smiling now, and turned to leave, fully expecting to be cut out like the stories had led me to believe.
I was at the door when my mother’s voice stopped me.
“Abigail,” she said. I spun around, bracing for the next round of Tansy’s bullets. “That ring is quite lovely.”
It was the first time my mother had ever said anything about my handmade jewelry.
“See you at Christmas… daughter.”
Then she smiled. My mother smiled.
The gates to Crowne Hall were swarming with press, and Ned was just inside them, walking up the cobblestone steps. When he saw me, he ran.
“Why would you do this?”
“It’s all a mistake,” I said. “We can still be together, Ned. Run away with me.”
He ran a hand through his hair, obviously torn. I stepped closer to him, eyes big. Lush, green hedges fenced us, the flash of the paparazzi just a few feet beyond.
“We can live off the grid, foraging for our food. I saved all your roses”—lie—“we can eat them and live off our love.”
He took a step back, having the gall to be frightened. I smiled wide, doing my best to look out of control.
Vote Then Read: Volume II Page 210